How did Steve Jobs do it without Granholm? (The Michigan View 10.06.11)

Posted by hpayne on October 6, 2011

How did Steve Jobs do it without Jennifer Granholm and Barack Obama?

In barely three decades, Jobs helped create a tech revolution – from product to infrastructure – without a dollar of federal help. While snake oil salesmen Granobama claim to know the future and blow taxpayer dollars on it, Jobs and his peers created ideas that attracted billions of dollars of private capital. The result is a digital infrastructure that spans the globe totally independent of government subsidy.

Currently flogging her Big Government treatise, “A Governor’s Story,” the ex-governor claims new technologies will only get off the ground with government subsidy – what she calls “a partnership with business.” Granobama claims that private markets are incapable of leveraging the “interstates of the future.”

Yet Apple’s digital revolution did exactly that. The iPhone and its predecessors spawned consumer products in such demand that investors sunk billions – hundreds of billions of private dollars – into a cellular infrastructure that covers nearly every inch of America and beyond. And it’s not just phone service. You want alternatives? Think 3G and 4G digital networks, wireless infrastructure, cloud computing, and other innovation that Big Government never saw coming.

Jobs’ digital revolution did nothing to humble these Harvard Law-trained Masters of the Universe.

They blindly spout dogma that they alone know the “technologies of the future.” Solar. Wind. Hybrids. Indeed, we are fortunate that Jen and Barack were not in power when Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak first innovated the PC computer. They might have tried to strangle it.

Today, America is in the midst of an energy revolution as entrepreneurs like Harold Hamm of Continental Resoruces innovate horizontal drilling technologies promising to double U.S. oil reserves.

Yet when Hamm joined other businessmen in a meeting with The One recently, he got the cold shoulder. “I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this,” Hamm relays to The Wall Street Journal.

The president’s reaction?

“He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.”

One can hear Obama now. . . “Oh sure, Mr. Jobs, coal-powered PCs will be important for the next few years. But Chu has assured me that within five years, we can power mainframes with wind turbines.”

Government know-it-alls ignore the capitalist incentives that unleashed Steve Jobs. Granobama claim that startups cannot compete against Big Business and their army of lobbyists – so they pour millions of tax dollars into Tesla and Fisker in order to “innovate” the “battery-powered cars of the future.”

Wrong again.

The cellular industry took on that most entrenched establishment – Big Telecom and landline telephony – and won. Investor billions poured into handheld startups once they proved that cell phone tech was viable as an alternative to landlines. Why don’t markets invest money in the solar industry? Because it cannot compete. Solyndra’s owners needed federal funds because – unlike Jobs – they had failed to prove its viability as an alternative technology.

Steve Jobs is proof that private capital discovers the tech of the future. Granobama never saw it coming.